Optical highways for light are at the heart of modern communications. But when it comes to guiding individual blips of light called photons, reliable transit is far less common. Now, a collaboration of researchers from the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), led by JQI Fellows…Read More

Scientists cataloguing the disintegration of an ethereal particle may have spotted new signs of a subtle discrepancy in the Standard Model—the theory that wraps up all of particle physics in a single equation. The new measurement, performed at the Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment…Read More

Researchers at the University of Maryland have made new measurements of a practically imperceptible effect, known as the Casimir force. In contrast to more familiar forces like gravitation, scientists didn’t even really know of its existence until Read More

If you holler at someone across your yard, the sound travels on the bustling movement of air molecules. But over long distances your voice needs help to reach its destination—help provided by a telephone or the Internet. Atoms don’t yell, but they can share…Read More

Two independent teams of scientists, including one from the Joint Quantum Institute, have used more than 50 interacting atomic qubits to mimic magnetic quantum matter, blowing past the complexity of previous demonstrations. The results appear in this week’s issue of Nature. As the basis…Read More

UMD-led HAWC collaboration suggests dark matter as possible culprit A mountaintop observatory in Mexico, built and operated by an international team of scientists, has captured the first wide-angle view of gamma rays emanating from two rapidly spinning stars. The High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Gamma-Ray Observatory…Read More

On August 17, 2017, at 12:41:04 UTC, scientists made the first direct observation of a merger between two neutron stars—the dense, collapsed cores that remain after large stars die in a supernova explosion. The merger is the first cosmological event observed in both gravitational…Read More

In Schrödinger's famous thought experiment, a cat seems to be both dead and alive—an idea that strains credulity. These days, cats still don't act this way, but physicists now regularly create analogues of Schrödinger's cat in the lab by smearing the microscopic quantum world…Read More